It won’t be the first time. Japan has been keeping track of earthquakes since 599 A.D., and in a 1996 issue of Nature, scientists described a 9.0 magnitude earthquake which, they believe, struck the Pacific Northwest of the US with a 600-mile-long wave. Thousands of miles away in Japan, not a tremor was felt. 10 hours later, it reached Japan, but for nearly 300 years, no one knew why, or where it had come from.

In the 1960s, Native Americans came forward and recounted oral histories passed on by their distant ancestors, telling of a bay draining dry and then an inundation of water which spared only a few lives. Those survivors later found canoes stuck in treetops.

Between Japanese and American records, there have been 41 major subduction zone earthquakes throughout a 1,400 year history. Divide that into 1,400 and you end up with 243–that’s one major event every 243 years on average. The region, which now has roughly 7 million people, is currently 315 years past the last catastrophic quake.

The long and the short of it is, we’re overdue and the odds are mounting. Read more at The New Yorker. -OJB